


as the wyrm turns

by tielan



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-22 22:39:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11976525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: Magic had laws. His mother had been a lecturer of physics at Oxford for years before her sciatica made the constant standing an agony. Hunith had been the one to teach Merlin that all energy came from somewhere, that there was nothing new under the sun, and that every action had an equal and opposite reaction. She’d also been the one to observe that her son’s abilities and gifts followed those rules...most of the time.





	as the wyrm turns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jungle_ride](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jungle_ride/gifts).



 

Merlin felt the explosion as it happened, a pulsing wave of magic that stabbed into him like a thousand needles piercing his skin, making him cry out. He swayed heavily on the train, bumping into Gwen, who looked up at him, frowning.

“What’s wrong, Merle? You’re looking pale—”

The next moment, they felt the train decelerate, slowing in the underground tunnel, although they’d only just left the last station and were still some way out from the next. The lights flickered as the train slowed and came to a stop.

Around them, commuters murmured, more annoyed by the discomfort of their surroundings than concerned about what had happened.

But up ahead, in the tunnel, Merlin could feel people dying.

Gwen glanced around, as though sensing that something wasn’t quite right. Then she sniffed at the air, an acrid tang blowing through the tunnels, pulled towards a sudden dearth of air as a fire swallowed all the oxygen ahead of it—

The secondary explosion blossomed, flinging sharp needles through Merlin’s brain. It was smaller but only marginally less fierce, and closer – a mere hundred metres along the track and racing towards their train—

He _reached_ , pulling magic out of the air, out of the people around him, out of warm metal and cold brick – all things had their energy, their power, and by taking of everything, he risked no single thing but himself—

_Magic is just the word we use for something we can’t explain scientifically, Merlin – not yet, anyway._

He flung his hand up and out, past Gwen’s startled face along the line of the tunnel. And the wave of power that he wielded flowed out through the commuters and the train, through curving brick and straight space, and met with the hungry fire that roared along the tunnel, sucking life and energy from anything it found…

 _Witchfire_.

He formed a shield before it, spreading tendrils of power through the old brick of the tube tunnels, anchoring it in the physical world, drawing from the age of the enduring stone and cement. It wasn’t as good as ancient ruins might have been, but it would be good enough for somewhere to stand; Merle could provide the rest.

Maybe.

The ‘secondary’ wave hit.

Merlin staggered back, the wash of the magical ‘heft’ lashing through him as the witchfire found its way barred and the clash of magics shuddered along any and all channels available. One of those channels just happened to be Merlin.

His flesh didn’t smoke, his bones didn’t char, but there was an instantt whenhe thought they might. He kept from screaming – just – but the pain was agonising, and he felt his knees hit the floor of the train hard.

There were hands – on his shoulder, under his arm – Gwen’s voice above his head. “Merle, are you okay?” Then there were shouts and cries of alarm as the train shuddered and the carriages jerked. The main lights went out, leaving only the emergency lighting, casting everything in ominous shadow. “What—? Oh no...”

“Explosion,” he whispered, barely loud enough for her to hear.

“Explosion?” Gwen looked around. “How do you know?”

Merlin couldn’t say how he knew – he just _knew._ Hauling himself up, and grabbed Gwen’s wrist and began pulling her towards the tail end of the train. “We need to get out of this train _now_!”

The PA crackled to life. “ _Good morning, customers. We’re sorry for the interruption to your service. Right now, we’re trying to ascertain what’s happening since the power’s gone out and there’s reports of smoke on the traaaaaaahhhhhHHHHH—!_ ”

The driver’s scream cut off abruptly, leaving only ominous silence.

There was a sudden rush for the back of the train, and Merlin and Gwen were caught up in the press of people as they tried to crowd out.

Crammed in among the bodies, Merlin felt _something_ – like a cockroach skittering across his thoughts, only far worse: a sense of something old and putrid. He gasped and flung out a hand, instinctively thrusting back at whatever it was.

“Merle!”

He gasped as Gwen caught his wrist, tried to shake her off. “Don’t—Don’t touch me!”

The _thing_ out there was closing in; he could feel it circling him like a vulture, and he needed the space to fight it, or else everything was going to—

More than one person cursed and swore at him as he shoved his way out of the mass of bodies heading for the back of the train, over to the door. Foremost among them was probably Gwen, who, rather than trying to save herself, clambered along after him.

“Merle? What’s happening? What’s wrong?” She peered at him, concerned, but didn’t make a move to touch him.

“I can’t—You have to be quiet, Gwen.” He closed his eyes, trying to get a feel for the _thing_ that was out there – magical, but not human, and _old_.

“You’re going to have an explanation for this later,” Gwen muttered, and he heard the tap of her phone as she tried to make contact with the outside world.

Merlin hoped there would _be_ a later in which to make an explanation. Because whatever was out there wasn’t happy now that it had been roused, thrashing around like an aggravated creature in pain—

This time he sensed the attack coming moments before it hit. He wedged his shoulders in the corner by the door and the seat divider, lifted his hands as though to fend off a physical attack, and braced...

What he encountered had enough heft behind it to make him grunt out loud. It felt like shouldering a great weight, although the heft of the attack was somewhere _else_ , not quite in the physical plane.

The train shuddered and there were shrieks further back along the train as those clambering off began to realise that perhaps the train wasn’t as likely to stay till as they’d thought. But Merlin knew that if he could stop what had awoken here, if he could defeat it now...

Then what?

Would it just go back to where it had been sleeping, quietly coiled, uncaring of the movements of men above it, until fire called it from its hole? Would it return to the deep, dark bowels of the earth now that it felt the hum of life above it? Would it sidle up to the world above and live peaceably among the tiny things that now swarmed across the earth?

Merlin already knew it wouldn’t.

He was here; he had to deal with it now.

He had _no_ idea of what to do.

Wedged by the door of the tube train, Merlin felt the thing draw back, and caught the sense of ancient coil upon rasping ancient coil. The train shuddered again, moving enough that he heard the screech of metal against metal and stone. He _reached_ for power.

Magic had laws. His mother had been a lecturer of physics at Oxford for years before her sciatica made the constant standing an agony. Hunith had been the one to teach Merlin that all energy came from somewhere, that there was nothing new under the sun, and that every action had an equal and opposite reaction. She’d also been the one to observe that her son’s abilities and gifts followed those rules...most of the time.

 _There’s a magnification factor that doesn’t correlate to anything that we understand about energy._ She’d said after he’d used the power of a single AA alkaline battery to plough their backyard garden for planting in five minutes. _I guess I may just have to accept that that factor is you._

Of course, they’d planted all the seeds and seedlings by hand. There were some things that magic simply couldn’t do. But what it _could_ do? Were things that no hand could manage.

Like an explosion in tunnels old enough and deep enough to rouse a _thing_ that came from a time long before the modern world...

The nearest power was the train’s power lines – warmth and light – an energy as familiar to Merlin as it would be to any child of the modern world. The _thing_ rousing from sleep was not of the modern world, and didn’t know what it could access. If it survived, it would probably learn; in the meantime, Merlin was going to take every advantage.

Merlin pulled a little energy from the power lines, twisting it to his will and transmuting it to ‘magic’. He’d never been able to explain this part to his ma, only that it wasn’t charged atoms, anymore, but a kind of quantum adjustment of the universe.

His mother had given him the no-nonsense eye. _That sounds suspiciously like bullshit, Merlin._

 _Well, it probably kind of is,_ he’d admitted. _But I don’t know how to describe it._

_My son the smartarse._

_I had to get it from somewhere. And would you argue with the results?_

She’d laughed. _No, I wouldn’t argue with the results._

Whatever it was – _magic_ would do as a descriptor – it allowed him to feel more than his immediate surroundings. From the delicate fragility of the train – a small and hollow set of metal tubes cradled in the tunnels of the underground – to the rising power that was rapidly uncoiling itself in rage at being roused. If it reached it’s full power, Merlin sensed, then not even he would be able to stop it.

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Gwen was standing in front of him, her eyes narrow, he expression concerned, one hand just on the verge of gripping his shoulder.

“I was starting to worry.” She glanced up as the world _shook_. “What’s going on?”

Merlin reached up and took her hand, warm and gripping strongly against the cold of his fingers. “I can’t tell you, Gwen. I don’t know the full extent of it myself.”

“But you know some of it?”

Even in the middle of a crisis, she was sharp enough to realise what he was and wasn’t saying.

Merlin winced. “Some—” The train shook again, and he felt the thing searching for them – for  _him_ , he realised. “I’m going to try something, but I have to stay here to do it...” He glanced past Gwen at the crowd of people still trying to get out of the train. They’d never make it out in time if he didn’t act now, but he knew he couldn’t keep Gwen from trying at least... “If you feel you have to go—”

“I’m not leaving without you!” 

“Then stay,” he said, closing his eyes and releasing her hand. “And don’t bother me.” Then, realising how that sounded, he opened his eyes, “I mean—”

Gwen rolled her eyes as she stepped back, the picture of exasperation. “Apologise later, Merle – if you end up saving us all!”

He didn’t flinch at the mockery; if he hadn’t known what he could do, he’d have been doubtful too. But if there was anger and terror in her voice, he heard resolution, too – if he wasn’t going anywhere, she wasn’t either. And if that meant they’d die here...

Merlin was rather touched, even as he closed his eyes.

He  _reached_ , not just for the train power lines, but for everything he could feel nearby. Nearly everything. He left the tiny flamelike energy of the people around him alone, and pulled on everything else – train lines, electrical conduits, and the power grid he could feel so close—

Around him, people shrieked as even the emergency lights bled out into darkness, leaving only the ghostly rectangles of their phones. Gwen inhaled sharply, but otherwise said nothing.

Merlin heard all of it, but heeded none of it.

Winding the power into a ‘hook’, he cast it out towards the _thing_ , sensing it more than he saw it – a great, coiling evil that had lain deep in the earth for who knew how long? The city had been built and sacked and rebuilt and burned down, and rebuilt and torn down, and rebuilt and bombed, and rebuilt...and yet the creature had slept through the centuries, ancient and puissant, until it was roused by...

Magic.

Someone had called it up out of its sleep, into a world that had no place for it, no defence against it.

No defender except Merlin.

The ‘hook’ struck and stuck, digging tendrils of power into the creature’s being, winding through it like grave wrappings around a corpse and pulling power from it like a vacuum sucked up dirt.

_Not a very elegant name for it – the vacuum,_ Gaius had noted the first time Merlin showed him the theory of it.

_Who cares about elegance if it gets the job done?_

It put up a fight, of course – as did all living things when their life was threatened.

Merlin felt it writhing, its screams shrilling in his ears like the screech of metal sliding against metal. Dimly, he was aware that the creature was somehow affecting the physical plane with it’s dying throes, that Gwen was curled up in a ball against the door, her hands uselessly pressed over her ears, while beyond her the crowd of people had fetched up in small, agonised balls of humanity—

The creature – more wyrm than drake – struggled, but it didn’t know what it was up against. It wasn’t fighting only Merlin, but also the full extent of the world which now lived above it now, which Merlin was drawing upon in his fight.

It was always going to lose.

Was it just Merlin’s imagination, or did the world shudder as it died? He felt the tension in the ‘hook’ die, like a cut line, and there was a moment when a blackness seemed to rush through his mind and body, achingly cold and empty, and full of unthinkinable horror. Then it chilly darkness was gone, and all that was left was the absence of light.

Merlin let the power flow back into the grid, into the people around him, into the train’s emergency power supply. The emergency lights of the train carriage flicked on one by one, startlingly bright after the deep black of the dark.

There were sobs further on, and the murmurs of voices asking what was happening, what was that, was everyone okay?

“Merle?” Gwen looked up at him from where she was sitting, exhausted on the floor of the carriage.

“Gwen.” He crouched down beside her. “Are you okay?”

“I think so?” She took her hands gingerly away from her ears, as though surprised that they were there at all. “Are you?”

“Yes.” He glanced at the crowd of people who were picking themselves up and making their way out to the exits, shocked and a little stunned by whatever their minds were telling them had just happened. He looked back at Gwen. “I’m fine.”

She was watching him, her gaze narrow and considering, as though she was seeing him anew. Merlin returned her gaze, steady and unflinching, waiting for whatever judgement she was going to pass on him.

He should have known better. This was Gwen.

“You’re going to tell me what that was,” she said, pleasant as though she’d just asked about his mother. “After we get out of here.”

“Yes,” Merlin said. “After.”

 


End file.
